Sean McElwee does a nice job in Salon of explaining why a successful Rand Paul run for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination would basically decimate the GOP’s base of support. To sum up McElwee’s argument, the tenets of libertarianism are not consistent with the values of Republican voters. Business elites want low taxes and lax regulation, but they also want corporate welfare, countercyclical spending, and a strong interventionist Federal Reserve. Foreign policy hawks want an interventionist foreign policy, large defense budgets, and support mass surveillance and brutality towards terrorism suspects. Social conservatives disagree with libertarians on almost every social issue, from drug and prison policy to gay marriage to immigration policy. The elderly do not support the libertarian goal of gutting Social Security. And then there are the nativists who primarily disagree with libertarians about immigration, but may also disagree with them on issues of crime and punishment.
Of course, Rand Paul has already begun to respond to these cross-currents in the Republican Party. He voted against immigration reform despite being for open borders. He’s taken a more hawkish line of foreign policy. He is not going to run his father’s pure libertarian campaign that, save on abortion, made no concessions to the above concerns. But Rand can’t flip-flop-flip his way through these minefields indefinitely. He is going to have to take some definite positions and stick by them. And, most importantly, he is presumably running for president in order to attempt to implement his true vision, which he developed under his father’s tutelage without any concern for what Republican primary voters would think about it. As he twists and contorts himself now in an effort to be a little of everything for everyone, he’s just maneuvering.
If he were to win the nomination, many business elites would bolt the party, including those on Wall Street, in agribusiness, and the defense industry. Foreign interventionists would come back to the Democratic Party in a reverse flow of neo-conservatism. The party’s advantage with the elderly would be greatly diminished. Social conservatives would be demoralized and would stay home.
To try to offset these losses, the party could make fresh appeals to young voters by going to the left of the Democratic Party on foreign policy, surveillance, the War on Drugs, and Prison Reform. But this would rip the GOP apart.
All of this may happen to the GOP anyway, whether or not Rand Paul actually wins the nomination. If he gets enough delegates, he could turn the Republican National Convention in Cleveland into an internecine civil war.
I don’t think the two-party system is stable any more. The Dems don’t appear to be on the verge of shedding any significant part of their coalition, but the GOP is going to have to pick a direction, and when they do, things are going to fly apart.
